White iPhone 4 hits stores Thursday after 10-month delay

The release of the phone, which some thought would never be released and others jokingly referred to as a mythical creature akin to the abominable snowman, was held up by manufacturing problems.

"The white iPhone 4 has finally arrived and it's beautiful," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement. "We appreciate everyone who has waited patiently while we've worked to get every detail right."

The Cupertino, Calif., tech giant originally planned to sell the white iPhone 4 alongside the black model when the phone first was released last June, until the production issues cropped up.

Apple never said definitively what the issues were, but speculation about paint that peeled under heat and problems with sensors in the device reacting to the lighter shade circulated online.

In July the company said, "White models of Apple's new iPhone 4 have continued to be more challenging to manufacture than we originally expected," while promising at that time that the phone would be released in 2010.

Other than the color, the white iPhone 4 is exactly the same in appearance and function as its black counterpart, running on Apple's A4 processor and offering Apple's Face Time video chat with a front-facing camera, among other features.

The white iPhone 4 will be available in the U.S. for both AT&T and Verizon customers and sell at the same price as the previously released black units: $199 for the 16GB model and $299 for the 32GB model with a new two-year wireless plan.

The news of the white iPhone 4's release comes on the same day that, after days of silence, Apple offered an explanation as to why its iPhones and 3G iPads track a user's location, citing user confusion and software bugs.